Restricting Activists’ Bank Accounts: Banking Powers, Criminal Procedure and Human Rights Defenders

Abstract

Bank accounts have become essential infrastructure for civic participation, particularly for grassroots groups that rely on public donations. Using a publicly reported Indonesian case in which transactions on a protest coordinator’s donation account were halted shortly before a demonstration, this article asks under which legal regime, and subject to which safeguards, such an account may be restricted. Employing doctrinal research with statutory, conceptual, and case approaches, and relying on officially attributed statements because the police letter and bank records were unavailable, it separates three regimes that public debate conflated: the bank’s own postponement under the Anti-Money Laundering Law, postponement or blocking ordered by law enforcement under that law, and blocking as a coercive measure under the 2025 Criminal Procedure Code. Each regime presupposes suspected proceeds of a predicate offense, a condition the only disclosed allegation, collecting donations without a permit, does not appear to meet; whether the restriction was unlawful depends on undisclosed documents. The article frames financial access as an enabling condition for civic participation and proposes a calibrated safeguard for the Human Rights Bill that preserves legitimate anti-money laundering functions.